


Something New

by horselizard



Category: British Comedy RPF
Genre: (sort of), Crack, Crossdressing, Dresses, Drunkenness, Fake Marriage, Feminization, Fluff, Height Differences, Humor, M/M, Makeup, Tiaras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-30
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-12-26 22:02:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18291098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horselizard/pseuds/horselizard
Summary: James isn't a big fan of fancy dress. He doesn't like having to put so much thought into his appearance. But he can scrub up pretty well, when he has the right motivation.





	Something New

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompter who requested feminisation kink off the back of James wearing a tiara on Hypothetical, with a nod to the prompter who wanted more James/Josh smut.
> 
> I don't know where this mental image came from, but I'm glad it did. A+ prompt, thank you very much.

‘That was one hell of a party,’ Josh slurred, as he slumped against the door of his flat, digging in his pocket for keys.

‘That,’ replied James, a little more forcefully than he’d intended to, ‘is because we smashed it.’

That much was true. They’d been the talk of the kitchen. James didn’t usually put much effort in to costume parties, but he was glad they’d pulled out the stops for this one. They had looked fantastic, and he’d known it, and everyone else had known it, and it had felt… well, pretty good, actually.

What had started out as frankly quite a pessimistic charity-shop tat-hunt had resulted in him having one of the best nights he’d had in a long time. He’d even managed to pass ‘tipsy’ and tip over into ‘drunk’ without his buoyant mood faltering. He’d been mooching round the clothes racks, resentful of the obligation to dress up, pre-emptively depressed at the no doubt pathetic outfit he’d end up scraping together, when his eye had been caught by something he’d never seen in a charity shop before: a display of wedding dresses.

Second-hand wedding dresses? He’d wandered over out of pure curiosity, since, he’d thought morosely, this would probably be the closest he ever got to a wedding dress. Actually, that wasn’t true, because he’d reached that age, and all his friends were getting married. Maybe he could at least wring some petty schadenfreude out of casually mentioning how much cheaper they could have got their bridal gown if they’d just popped down the Oxfam.

He’d flipped over the price tag on one of them, and boggled. How could they still be so expensive, even pre-owned? He’d checked another, and another. Getting married was a mug’s game, clearly. Then suddenly he’d found one which made him boggle again, this time because of how much cheaper it was than the others. He’d taken a step back, and squinted at it.

Eventually he’d spotted it: a sizeable stain, wine maybe, on the white satin of the bodice, just above the hip. And on closer inspection, one of the layers of puffy netting which made up the skirt looked to have been torn; a whole section of it was missing. Someone had obviously enjoyed their wedding reception a little too much. That did explain it, to be fair. To start with, he’d wondered whether the knock-down price was because of the unusual body type it was tailored for: skinny, flat-chested, and considerably taller than your average bride. A body type, in fact, quite similar to his own.

He’d looked around. The changing room was empty; nobody was paying any attention. Well, he’d wasted enough of his day on this fruitless quest already; he might as well waste another fruitless ten minutes having a bit of a laugh.

Ten minutes later, he was staring at his reflection, somewhat baffled by the turn events had taken. He didn’t have the highest opinion of his own physical appearance, but even he could see that he looked… _good_ … in this dress. Like, _really_ good. His awkward angles were softened and smoothed out, his jutting ribs and knobbly knees hidden under the graceful sweep of the fabric. He was, in sum, a long tall streak of virginal-white elegance.

He’d stared at his reflection a little longer, and then he’d done the only thing he could do under the circumstances: buy the dress, and phone Josh.

* * *

They had absolutely smashed it. James had ripped off the torn section of netting and fashioned it into a veil, jamming it onto a flimsy plastic tiara he’d fished out from somewhere; Josh had done himself up in his best suit, pinned a carnation to his lapel, and beamed with apparently genuine pride all night, hanging off his willowy bride’s arm. He’d looked even shorter than he usually did when standing next to James, because James had somehow managed to blag a pair of white heels off his biggest-footed female friend, and (against all advice) had refused to take them off all night. But that had just improved the effect, as well as being a good excuse for James to sit down a lot, which had felt like the kind of thing that the kind of girl that he seemed to be would do.

When James had first examined his reflection in the changing room mirror, he wouldn’t have said he looked pretty. Another word had come to mind, a word he’d liked better, and that word was ‘striking’. James had liked the idea of ‘striking’. He was no makeup artist, but he’d been determined to do himself justice for this, so he’d pulled up YouTube and intently watched beginner tutorials until he thought he had some idea of what was going on.

The point of powder and blusher seemed to be to make your face uniformly pale and then accentuate your cheekbones, and James thought he more or less had that covered already, so he’d ignored them and concentrated on lips and eyes. Lipstick was easy, once he’d figured out you weren’t supposed to go all the way to the corners; eye makeup had been a little harder, until he’d discovered a technique which the tutorials called ‘blending’, and he called ‘smudging’. He’d mess up his eyeliner, and then smudge it a bit, then he’d mess up the silvery-grey eyeshadow on his lids, and then smudge it a bit, then he’d mess up the darker grey eyeshadow on his browbones (he was learning a lot of new words through this venture), and then smudge the whole thing a bit, and then you couldn’t really tell that he’d messed it up in the first place. The overall effect was slightly closer to ‘irascible panda’ than he’d intended, but he’d been quite happy with it, reasoning that panda was halfway to polar bear, and polar bear was halfway to ice queen.

(He hadn’t been intending to bother with mascara, since it seemed like far too much of a liability, but he’d idly tried some, and been astonished to discover that his eyelashes, naturally so pale they were almost see-through, were _actually really long_. This discovery had seemed too earth-shattering to keep to himself, so he’d sat down with a mirror, a mascara wand, and grim determination until he was finally able to apply the stuff neatly. It had been worth it; the end result definitely fit the brief of ‘striking’.)

And once he had the dress on, and the makeup on, and the veil on, and the heels on… he’d found he couldn’t help but behave in a certain way. He held his head high, carried himself with deliberate movements, inhabited his full six-feet-and-more-than-usual without apology. The boy who slouched, squirmed and splayed his limbs at unlikely angles became a girl who stood tall, sat straight, and held herself with a poised stillness that unnerved onlookers, especially ones she was Paddington-Bear-staring at through the smoky rings of her eyes. He hadn’t even needed to remember to sit with his knees together or avoid unthinkingly rubbing at his makeup; it just felt natural, an appropriately dignified way to behave. And the reactions of everyone around him, the way they gathered around as he held court, unquestioningly complied when he imperiously commanded them to fetch him another drink, made it clear that they thought so too.

At one point, someone had jokingly complained that he and Josh weren’t wearing wedding rings, and therefore the entire costume was ruined. James had marched over to the snack table (only wobbling slightly), poked through a bowl of Haribo, and returned brandishing two gummy rings.

‘I’d get down on one knee,’ he’d said as he wedged one of them onto Josh’s finger, ‘but it’s a damn long way in these shoes, and I might not make it back up again.’

‘Oh, darling, I don’t mind,’ Josh had giggled, returning the favour, ‘it’s beautiful.’

They’d taken spoof ‘ring reveal’ selfies, not caring that it didn’t make much sense when they were already dressed in wedding garb, and posted one to Twitter, not caring how many insipid @-mentions from unimaginative fans they’d have in the morning, and gleefully flaunted the rings until they started to melt stickily onto their pint glasses, not caring that the person who’d first made the joke had long ago regretted her life choices and escaped to another room.

* * *

The vagaries of London travel (especially while in fancy dress) had meant it made sense for James to crash at Josh’s after the party, and that had been the plan from the outset, which James was glad of as he swayed gently on his pinching heels. He waited patiently while Josh fumbled with the key, inwardly sighing with relief when the door eventually swung open.

But Josh didn’t go in, and James, much as he wanted to step inside and pull off his shoes, was too polite to barge past his host, although not too polite to make little grumbling noises. Instead, Josh reached over and put one arm round James’s back, then bent down and put his other arm behind James’s knees.

‘What are you doing?’ James frowned.

‘C’mon,’ Josh mumbled, ‘’s tradition, innit.’

‘What? What’s tradition?’ James pressed, struggling through a haze of beer to decipher his friend’s motivations.

Josh looked up. ‘T’carry you over the threshold.’

James stood still in thought for a moment, oblivious to Josh shuffling around testing for the best place to plant his feet. ‘I’m not having our honeymoon in your flat,’ he said at last. ‘That’s a dealbreak– whoa! Fuck!’

Josh had managed to pick him up, but only just. He flung his lace-sleeved arms round Josh’s neck, desperately trying to shift his weight as close against him as he could, as Josh staggered forward, drunkenly searching for his lost balance. By some miracle, he managed to steady himself, and they stopped there in the doorway, breathing heavily.

‘Jesus Christ, Josh,’ James shrilled, aghast.

‘What, like you’re heavy?’ Josh grinned unapologetically.

The sofabed in the front room had been made up ready for James’s arrival, and Josh just about managed to haul James over to it before his arms gave out, and they collapsed onto it in a giggling heap.

‘I want a divorce,’ James exclaimed into Josh’s armpit.

‘Fine by me,’ Josh parried as he unsteadily pushed himself up onto his elbows. ‘Just as long as we can have lots of hot angsty break-up sex.’

James stared at him. His face, he realised, was barely inches away from his own. He stared at him for longer than he would have if he’d thought that had just been a joke.

‘Oh, come on,’ Josh grumbled, looking a little embarrassed, ‘surely you _realise_ you’re gorgeous?’

James continued to stare at him. This wasn’t a poised, composed, imperious stare; this was the stare of someone lying sprawled across a sofabed, skirts rucked up around their knees, veil hanging crooked, with their best friend lying on top of them clumsily propositioning them, and absolutely no clue how to handle it.

‘God, James,’ Josh muttered, ‘don’t just – don’t just lie there with your mouth hanging open, it makes me want to – to find something to – put in it. Fuck, did I just say that? Fuck, I’m sorry,’ he groaned, trying uncoordinatedly to shuffle out of James’s personal space.

James’s arm reached a decision fractionally sooner than the rest of him did, shooting out and grasping Josh’s tie. Josh stopped his escape attempt, stunned into motionlessness, looking up at his friend in confusion.

They had smashed it. He had been striking. Josh had been with him all the way. He closed his mouth, lifted his chin, and gathered his courage. Something in his bearing changed, just slightly.

‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘that it would be better for both of us,’ he gently pulled Josh closer, ‘if we found something else to occupy our mouths.’

Thinking about it, from a purely factual standpoint, of _course_ this would probably be the closest he ever got to a wedding dress. As he set about discovering what his lipstick would look like on Josh, James decided he was pretty okay with this.


End file.
